At work… by Charlotte

At work… by Charlotte

When I was 24 years old I got a job in PR with a large luxury car company just outside of Paris. I and English guy were the only two foreigners in the comm team and we sometimes had lunch together. One day I ran into him and a couple of older managers at the company in the hallway. One of senior managers made a joke about how I was dressed, asked me to wear a skirt more often and said that everyone in the office wanted to have sex with me. Everyone laughed loud at the poor joke and comments, especially loud was the laughter from the more junior colleagues including the guy who I considered a friend.
I didn’t bring it up with my boss as I had already been approached on the internal messaging system by one of the guys from the IT department a couple of days earlier where he had asked me to sleep with him as he had been nice enough to drop me off at the train station earlier that week(!)… apparently saying “thank you” had not been enough. I had already brought up the unwanted advances by the IT-guy with my boss and saw from his facial expression that I was the one causing problems so I didn’t even consider bringing up the sexist jokes. I was mostly ashamed and humiliated about what had happened.

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